Would You Like to Build Your Own Website?

Do you ever get started on a little project, just to pass a bit of time, and get so involved that it eventually gets totally out of hand? That happened to me this week. I was reading through all the wonderful comments we’ve been getting, with all the beautiful paper mache sculptures people have been showing off, and I kept seeing a question that comes up over and over. It goes a bit like this:

Lovely sculpture! Do you have a website?

The answer, quite often, is “no.”

Since I know how easy it is to get a website up and running, and it seems like many people still think it’s difficult, I thought I’d write a quick post showing you how to do it.

Then I realized that I wouldn’t be able to get any screen shots unless I bought a new domain name and built a few pages.

And then I realized that one long post would be totally confusing, so it morphed, over the last four or five days, into a completely new website. How the heck did that happen?

To get some screen shots, I built this dummy site, as a separate file inside my new domain:

It doesn’t look too bad, does it? It’s simple, but it works. (Design fault – those big eyeballs in the custom header image would distract visitors, and make it hard to pay attention to the text on the page. You might want to choose a more subtle image for your own website header).

— Just to show you how out-of-control this project became – I had no intention of anyone actually seeing the dummy site itself, just the screenshots in the tutorials. Of course, I installed all the free plugins that I recommend in the lessons, and one of them works so well it got the dummy page indexed in Google literally overnight. Dang. I went back in this morning and edited the copy so people would know my real paper mache site is right here, at UltimatePaperMache.com – just in case Google takes them to the dummy site if they do a search for my name.

But it does prove the system works – there are companies that charge hundreds of dollars to get a website indexed, and I did it for free. Pretty cool, don’t you think? I’ll tell you the secret, and I won’t charge you a dime for it…. 🙂

My goal was to prove that someone could put up a site in 30 minutes or less. I failed – it took me about an hour. Then it took me at least three days to show you which buttons I pushed. It will take longer to read the lessons than it will be to do the actual work of building your site, especially if you already have some photos on hand that you’d like to show off. If you have to go find some images, it might take a bit longer.

So – if you’d like to answer “Yes!” the next time somebody asks you if you’ve got a website, go check out the lessons I wrote this week at BuildWebsiteEasyOnline.com

Yeah, I know that’s not a very snazzy domain name, but I was in a hurry. I thought I’d have the whole project done in half an hour, remember? And that included the time spent finding and buying my new domain name. You, of course, will take your time and build a much prettier website, with a nicer URL.

7 thoughts on “Would You Like to Build Your Own Website?”

Very cool article, Jonni. I just recently built my site via WordPress and I am one who spends a ton of time because I really don’t understand the language and what-not. Thanks for making it easier to understand. Will def follow your lessons on the other site.
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Jonni is an affiliate of Amazon.com. When you make a purchase through a link on this site, the small commission she receives will help keep this site online. It costs money to run a site with many as 100,000 visitors a year and hundreds of free projects, so your support is always appreciated!